Hat Guy

This kid and hats…

Yesterday, driving 65 mph down the highway, five minutes from home, my tire blew out. I managed to pull over to the left “shoulder,” and then, after narrowly missing a few rear end collisions, hobbled my car over to the right shoulder where I was safer. Got the tire-changing service on the horn, and buckled in to wait it out. Boof hopped on the bus and headed our way, and we switched cars so I could take my badly shaken self home to drink and nurse all the what-if-fears that were racing in my mind.

I’ve had several accidents or narrow misses since Potamus was born, but none when he was in the car. To look in my rear view mirror and see the cars whizzing by and narrowly missing me, put so much in perspective.

I kept him home today. Partially due to logistics in getting my spare tire taken off and replaced, and trying to get him out to his daycare 30 minutes away by their dropoff deadline just would add more stress. So we hung out in the Les Schwab waiting, and when the 2.5 year old squirrelyness kicked in, we headed next door to the thrift store, where Potamus became enthralled with a new hat (he really is turning out to be a hat guy), and he got a scolding by a worker missing all her front teeth for picking “a girl’s hat.” She tried to convince him an ever-so-cool elmo visor was more boy appropriate, but he liked his southern bonnet much better thankyouverymuch.

My decision to keep him home today has turned out to be lovely. We napped, and watched some PBS, and he’s currently shouting for his dad in the backyard.

We did not buy that hat.

Don’t Call Me Goldilocks

I got to the coffee shop early, to get my cappuccino order in and to make sure they had my favorite blueberry scone. I was meeting a friend from church, and her niece (and great grand nieces) to have a little ‘intervention’ type meeting. In reality I was mostly there to give some advice and de-stigmatize mental illnesss, and give some information on career development. But before the meeting started, I went and got myself a table…

I sat down at the head of a long table, nestled my purse in one chair, and spread my stuff out, thinking it’d be a good place to talk without bothering the others that were sitting around quietly doing their coffee shop thing. After I had sat there for a second, I decided that I would sit on one side of the table, letting my friend and her niece sit next to each other, thinking that they might feel more comfortable without being split up. So I shuffled my things, and switched seats, and heard a male voice say:

“What, are you like Goldilocks?”

Ignoring him, I brought out my notepad and broke my scone. I could see him out of my peripheral vision, sitting in the ‘comfy’ chairs to my right by the door.

“Did you not hear me? Everyone’s tuned out these days. Ear buds and not paying attention to things people say.”

And that when I said, without turning my head,

“No, I heard you the first time, I was just ignoring your rude commentary on my seating choice. I moved because I had a friend coming with her friend and thought they’d feel more comfortable sitting next to each other.”

Maybe I sounded bitchy. He laughed when I said the line about hearing and ignoring him. And then he started rambling to the guy next to him about the takeover of technology (that guy was reading on his iPad) and how he only has a cell phone to call his sister because she has cancer.

The crisis counselor helpful type felt bad for him. I’ve met friends (hi Yan!) in similar situations in this coffee shop before. I somehow manage to attract people with personal issues whenever I’m minding my own business. Maybe they see things that others don’t, and sometimes I’m int he mood, but today I was not. Because he called me Goldilocks, like I was a little girl. And said it in a derogatory way, with disdain in his voice.

Annoying.

And the older I get the less I can keep my mouth shut when someone annoys me. I don’t think my response was rude, just blunt and to the point. Tit for tat. He didn’t seem offended, and after awhile ambled away with is $1 refill.

Emotional Blackmail by our Daycare!

I hitched Potamus onto one hip and entered the door code early yesterday morning. We were running late because of the rain and traffic, and Potamus was dawdling in the parking lot wanting “up, up!” instead of splashing through the puddles like he normally does. I set him on the counter inside, signed him in, and was cheerfully accosted by the daycare director holding out a packet from Lil’ Buckaroos photography.

I had seen the signs for the past few weeks, about the pony ride and pictures happening, but assumed it was something that parents had to opt in to participate. Not needing pony pictures with my kidlet, I just ignored all the paperwork. But there it was, in my hand, 7 prints, of my son on the back of a pony, dressed in cowboy gear, and the instructions to pay $25 within a week, order prints online, or return the proofs to the office.

How could I return such adorably overpriced western posed pictures with my one and only? He looked so cute perched on Dakota the pony, tipping his hat, and staring moodily into the camera. I’m a sucker for photos, anyway, and so I ponied up (pun intended) the $25 to pay for the proofs. I won’t even go online to see the package options, because I might end up spending his entire college fund on pony pictures.

But it made me laugh, because it was the best marketing strategy ever. How many parents are going to return the already printed photos of their adorable children riding ponies? I’m guessing not many. The strategy worked, though if it had been something else besides pony pictures, I might have been legitamtely mad. Or if I had an aversion to ponies and felt like I should have been given the option to give permission for my son to ride atop those sometimes vicious little creatures.

I came home and showed Boof the pictures, and he agreed they were cute. Though his heartstrings are not tugged nearly as much as mine, though he loved the idea of giving one of them to his dad for Father’s Day, because Potamus is in love with his “Buppa” and they do manly cowboy things together, like tromp through yard with tools, and I think he’ll love the picture. And who wouldn’t, because my child is adorable, ammirite?

 

 

Compassion for Difficult Family Members?

Last night my mom left a voicemail to call her back. Assuming that a voicemail like that was bad news, I called back pretty immediately. And she proceeded to say:

“Your Uncle Matt is currently in the hospital. He lost his voice last week, and they went in for a checkup and turns out he has a really large tumor in his neck. And two tumors at the base of his skull. And so they’re operating on the one in his throat, first, because it’s the biggest. They’re not sure if it’s cancerous, but it’s probably a side effect from the radiation he had as a kid for that tumor in his face.”

I tried to muster some compassion. This is my mother’s youngest sibling, twelve years her junior, and she was calling to ‘keep [you] in the loop so you don’t hear from the grapevine.’ But honestly…honestly? I couldn’t muster compassion. I tried to imagine my mother’s perspective, caring for her younger brother, especially since she was a mother figure to him growing up, but I just couldn’t do it. I thanked her for letting me know, and got off the phone quickly to head into my yoga class.

And before you start labeling me a horrible human, for taking this news so lightly, I must explain:

My uncle is an asshole.

I mean, not your average run-of-the-mill asshole, but like a certified ASSHOLE of asshole extremes.

It’s hard to put all the stories into one blog post. But he’s 50 years old (ish?) and lives next door to my parents…in the upstairs part of my grandparents house. He hasn’t worked a job in 30ish years, and spends his days sleeping and his nights playing pool tournaments. He is the angriest person I have ever met, and has done shitty things like strangling my parent’s pitbull (not to death, but still), calling and cussing out my family on their voicemail, dispatching the sheriff to the school my mom works at to complain about ‘noise’ (aka the dog barking…note, my parents live in the countryside), disowning his daughter because she married a black man, screaming obscenities at his 3 year old nephew for not shutting the door quick enough, etc. etc. etc.

These incidents have been happening since I was a child. He is angry, probably mentally ill, and has caused HUGE tensions in the family. The most difficult part is seeing my grandparents enable his bad behavior, and justify it, though now as a mom I wonder if I should be less hard on my grandma, specifically. And while his ASSHOLE behavior is no reason to wish cancer, or tumors, on him, I am still having a difficult time mustering up any compassion for his condition.

I am wondering what to do about this feeling. Not going to lie, there have been times in the past that I wished ill upon him because of how awful he has treated members of the family. But lately I have mostly felt neutral. Like, if I don’t have to think about him, or experience him in any way (can you believe it, after 8 years of being together, Boof has still never met him?) then I am much happier. At the end of the day, though, he is my mother’s brother, and she is worried about his health.

 

Thoughts? How do you have compassion or empathy for assholes difficult family members?

Ten Thousand Angels

…the disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.”

16 Jesus replied, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.”

17 “We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish,” they answered.

18 “Bring them here to me,” he said. 19 And he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people. 20 They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. 21 The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children. Mathew 14: 15-21

 

I’m overwhelmed. This morning as I was scrolling through Twitter, I cam across a tweet stating that last week 10,000 sponsorships were dropped at World Vision.

Wait, let me stop using shiny language: 10,000 kids weren’t going to get their next meal, or school day’s education, or clean water because  evangelical “Christians” didn’t like a policy change. Ten thousand. Let that sink in for a second. A news story goes out, and in less than 48 hours is reversed, because 10,000 kids weren’t going to get fed. As a former-evangelical-Christian I want to ask…where was the prayer? I mean, I grew up praying over almost every decision (not quite like “God should I buy this prom dress?” but close), and so I want to fucking know:

WHY DIDN’T THOSE DUMBASSES FUCKING PRAY FOR FIVE MINUTES ABOUT WHETHER THEY SHOULD FEED A STARVING CHILD OR GO ON SOME POLITICAL POWER TRIP?

Whoa, sorry, got carried away there for a second.

But seriously.

In the passage above, Jesus is out, doing his thing and some people get hungry. You know what he does? He feeds them. 5,000 of them (just the men, clearly more with children and women). Last week the evangelical ‘disciples’ turned away TWICE AS MANY legitimately hungry children because of a political agenda. Jesus didn’t ask questions, he just fed them. The disciples wanted the families to buy their own damn dinner, but Jesus didn’t turn them away, and somehow multiplied a small amount of food into enough to feed all of them.

I’m angry.

Part of me feels relief that I no longer subscribe to evangelicalism, that I’m one of the ones who has left (escaped?). But another part of me is sad that the reason I don’t is because of how shittily their doing this whole Christlike thing. Because there was a time, and I miss it greatly, where I sat in the pews with good people and felt love and peace and a longing to follow and belong forever. I’m not in that place anymore, but have resonated with blogs like this on those who stay in the church.

I hope those children got their sponsorships back, and that they didn’t go hungry. I hope those people who pulled their sponsorships can face themselves in the mirror each morning.  I hope that I can figure out how to be more than just angry about this whole mess.

 

 

The Price of Anger: Exhaustion

Typically my anger is directed toward others, and is mostly in the form of smallish annoyances. The emotion is like a match: quick to light and quick to burn out. For those that see my annoyance on an almost daily basis they get used to the quickness of it, though I suppose some would say that if you’re burned by a match it leaves a mark even if the flame goes out quickly.

My sister says that I have the ability to change the temperature in a room. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know that my energy is powerful and when not harnessed it has caused destruction. Maybe I’m thinking of Rogue from the X Men type ‘powers.’ At any rate, I cycle through annoyance on a daily basis, but the anger I felt the other day is much more insidious and harder to shake. It’s exhausting.

I feel like I’ve run a marathon through mud or molasses. My mind wants me to believe that I’ve learned something from that experience on Tuesday, but I’m not quite sure that it’s accurate. What’s challenging is that I KNOW that being a teacher is like being a therapist and that the cliche of leading horses to water is true. I know that. I really do know that. And believe it. And I’m still stuck. Which is the most frustrating part of it all.

The self-loathing that comes with this level of anger (dare I say rage?) is awful. I could curl up in bed all day with this shitty stomach ache. It leads to more destructive activities, like an obsession with alcohol (for which I haven’t consumed, because I am mostly afraid that choosing alcohol while I’m so angry will only make things worse), and a desire to give up yoga completely, and to lash out at all the lovely supportive people around me.

And I don’t want to hear about your damn problems, either. That’s the thing…I tried calling a friend the other day, and as she chattered on about whatever she was talking about I found myself seething with even more anger. I didn’t want to hear it. Not one more complaint about her job or her schooling or her dogs who chewed something up. Nope. Wasn’t going to have it. Emotionally and mentally spent.

It’s the end of my work week. Today the student’s are giving their speeches. And we will all go home early. I’ll probably go to yoga and hopefully can pull myself out of this funk, because it’s a terrible feeling.

How to Pass the Time when You’re Waiting To Hear That Your Student Is Not Dead…

“I want to die! I want to die!” is not the first thing you want to read in your Monday morning email. Especially when the email was sent at 2:24 am on Saturday, a day you don’t work nor check email. Boundaries are super important in this job, and I make sure to live up to the boundaries that I set with my students. This isn’t the 24/7 crisis work that I used to do, and technically I am not even acting in the counseling capacity for my students, but when I read an email like that my heart skips a beat (or 12).

Because I care a great deal about students, and I also take suicidal ideation seriously.

I know, as a mental health counselor, that there is a difference between wanting to die and wanting to kill myself but without the ability to do a face-to-face assessment I cannot determine the level of threat in this email. And with a student not responding to my response email(s) or phone call, I am left in the emotional lurch.

Tomorrow, at noon, I will put a welfare check out on this student, per the college’s recommendation. But, in the meantime, my heart feels bound up and my normally boundaries-of-steel are crumbling into an almost state of panic.

I’ve never lost a student to suicide. I am frank in my lectures and in my last assessment with the student I am confident they were in a depressed state but had no suicide ideation, let alone any means or plan. I am confident in that. And yet…and yet…that email…and how quickly things can spiral.

In the meantime, while I wait for that return email, or that police knock on their door, I am drinking beer and folding underwear. Because nothing puts the world at ease like sorting panties into sexy and period piles on my coffee table. I have to live this way, one foot in front of the other…focus on the mundane, the real, the things I can control right now.

And wait.

Waiting is the hardest part.

And for those of you that vibe or shake or pray or drum or send good thoughts…you wanna send them my student’s way?

Thanks.

Photos-The Half Truth Edition

For the past year I have seen many blogs about how the pictures we post on social media show a skewed view of life. And while I have always fundamentally agreed that yes, rarely do people show pictures on Instagram where they add a filter over their bulging anger face veins in a true-to-this-moment selfie. But I’ve also said that those picture moments are JUST AS REAL as the moments right before or after. They show one part of the story.

My opinions fundamentally haven’t changed on that opinion, but I have had two experiences in the past week that have caused me to be frustrated with my own portrayal of my life and emotions on social media. Because I have posted pictures of cool things, or times when I am smiling for the camera but am seething on the inside because all of my introverted faculties are being bombarded by an overwhelm of stimuli and I want to punch somebody in the face. In real life, I am a terrible faker. People know how I’m feeling from about 100 yards away, and those who can’t quite figure out my emotions usually assume it’s bad and steer clear of me unless I’m obviously putting out happy-clappy vibes. But on social media…that’s where I am good at faking.

For example…this sweet moment:

The reason we’re at this super sweet park is because my parent’s pissed me off at YET ANOTHER Christmas get together. They told me to “watch my tone” when I was frustrated about the noise level and the fact that Potamus was melting down and we still had three hours to go until the party was over. So while I snapped this adorable picture, I was actually standing outside in the cold without a coat or a sweater, and was trying to calm myself down. Potamus hadn’t napped, was way over stimulated, and we clearly both needed a little fresh air to cool off. But this pic got slapped up to Instagram and Facebook and it looks so sweet, and truthfully the moment WAS sweet, but inside I was seething.

Then there’s this moment, where I’m snuggled up with my sister…who actually turns out to have had a 102.5 fever. We’re mugging for the camera, and all is going well with us, but I am completely overhwelmed by the noise and heat and stimulation happening in my aunt’s house at this point. I’m holding it together for the pciture, but can you see the way I’m gripping the table and my sister’s arm like please keep me sane.

And all those adorable pictures from MOHAI? Reason that nobody else was in them was because my in-laws were clearly in a pissy mood, and so I decided to do the tour by myself. I enjoyed myself, truly, but was also freaking annoyed at yet another family function that turned into a shit storm because there are too many opinionated people trying to run the show.

I know that my photos tell a truth. They might not tell the WHOLE truth, which is what’s going on in my head, versus what’s happening around me, versus what I want to be happening. But I still stand by them, even those these last few interactions I’ve taken have actually felt cruddier than others. I know I’ll look back and know that there were sweet moments where I have seen Potamus grow, but I hate that there’s a discrepancy between what I sometimes feel, and what I look like in a photo…though who wants to look like a bitter uncomfortable hag in every photo? Haha!

What’s your thoughts/opinions on photos posted to social media? Photos in general?

I’m Not the Angry One

It was an emotionally exhausting journey across the mountains. Potamus slept until Issaquah (which is about…um…thirty minutes), and then cried until we got to Cle Elum for a snack. And then he ate a lot of french fries, and cried some more because he was out of water, and then he was content for five minutes down the road before he started to scream again because he had pooped.

We had three stops on the “2.5 hour” drive. It was hell. There might have been a ten minute stretch where I plugged my ears and shut my eyes (I wasn’t driving) and tried to notice my breath like I did when I was in labor or in Savasana in yoga. It helped me to keep myself from hurling out of the speeding car at 70 mph.

But other than that, the trip was brilliant. There was a wound-up kiddo who loved his gifts, and plenty of cupcakes that induced sugar highs for all of us, and maybe some good natured teasing. I even managed to only shout one time, out of passion and not anger, about how cool I actually think The Pope is (because my dad insinuated he was evil because he was ‘Marxist,’ which I later debunked). And then, about ten minutes until we left, the shit hit the fan. Somehow my dad managed to start yelling at me and saying that I had been yelling at him and it became a crazy convoluted argument about who-the-fuck-knows-why, of which I left feeling confused and sad and might have cried for twenty minutes until we got out of the city limits. Ad if you know me, you know that I cry approximately every 2 years, so it’s a pretty freaking big deal.

Because no matter what I do, I somehow am always pegged as the ‘angry one’ in the family. I’m tired of having a perfectly good time and still not ‘doing it right enough,’ to show my family t hat I’m not the angry  depressed teenager I used to be. But somehow in pouring my heart out to Boof, I realized…I am not the angry one. I haven’t ever really been the angry one. In fact, my dad, who has been so pegged as jovial and overly rational (let’s sit down and discuss this conflict using I statements) is actually the angry one. He is angry. I am not. And that realization shifted something in me.

I am not angry.

Knowing that he is angry relieves me. It makes sense for why he’s been lashing out and blaming me for things that I didn’t actually do. I don’t know why he’s angry, what hes’ bottled up over the years, but that’s not my job to figure out. My job is to work on myself, which I have been doing in therapy, and it’s my job to continue to treat him compassionately. So while I don’t like having to have experienced that explosiveness earlier today, I do like the insight, because now I feel like I am better prepared to handle myself in the future.

What have you learned about your parents over the years that has re-shaped how you view yourself, your childhood, or them?

Vacation Hangover

 

Bye bye hotel. Bye bye vacation. The cruel trick of coming home from a few days in a new reality. It’s like coming off a drug, where you don’t simply go back to the normal baseline, but take a dip into depression before the bouncing back happens. Our final meal together, at our hometown brewery, only a few minutes away from home, I could feel us slipping back into the REAL us, not the vacation us that held hands and flirted and drank too many mimosas to keep track. Our return felt right, but the crumbs on the carpet grated against our nerves, and we slipped into checking our phones and trying to catch up on all our DVR’ed shows. The baby was clingy. The dog was barking. The grandparents wanted to hear, and tell, every detail of the weekend.

It was like being hungover. That cotton mouth, shitty sleep, headachy feeling after a long night of drinking. I think it’s worth it to go on a vacation, especially since it had been two years since we’ve had an alone weekend, but the yucky re-entry feeling sometimes doesn’t feel worth it, you know? If it was shitty on the front end, maybe, but shitty on the re-entry…it’s almost enough to make me think about holding off on another vacation any time soon. Good thing I have my Albuquerque trip in 5 weeks to get my feet wet again!